Maria Atkinson > Maria's Quotes

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.”
― Stephen King

“It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.”
― Tallulah Bankhead

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Cicero

“I cannot live without books.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“It's like if the music is loud enough I won't be able to listen to my own thoughts. ”
― Nic Sheff, Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“And though I have done many shameful things, I am not ashamed of who I am. I am not ashamed of who I am because I know who I am. I have tried to rip myself open and expose everything inside - accepting my weaknesses and strengths - not trying to be anyone else. 'Cause that never works, does it?

So my challenge is to be authentic. An I believe I am today. I believe I am.”
― Nic Sheff, Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines

“As long as you look for someone else to validate who you are by seeking their approval, you are setting yourself up for disaster. You have to be whole and complete in yourself. No one can give you that. You have to know who you are - what others say is irrelevant.”
― Nic Sheff

“dream interpretation were ways of converting our little personal miseries into big robust myths”
― Justin Evans, A Good and Happy Child

“An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“A world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white.”
― David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

“This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his "Notes from Underground". The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others.”
― David Foster Wallace

“We are all victims of what is done to us. We can either use that as an excuse for failure, knowing that if we fail it isn't really our fault, or we can say, 'I want something better than that, I deserve something better than that, and i'm going to try to make myself a life worth living.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy

“Is this every kid's worst fear - that his mother and father don't love him? It was mine. (239)”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy: A Memoir

“When we realize, really get to know what stinkers we are, it takes only a little depression to tip the scales in favor of suicide. - Dr. Walter Freeman (62)”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy: A Memoir

“I never get enough of the adrenaline rush of hearing good music played live and played loud like this. Hearing these songs again snatches me out of the day-to-day and helps me forget all the things I usually waste my time worrying about. As long as the music's playing I don't have to do anything except listen, relax, and enjoy myself.”
― David Moody, Hater

“Until now we’ve discriminated against each other according to race, religion, age, gender and just about every other differentiation imaginable. Look around you tonight and you’ll see that those differences are gone. Now, to put things as simplistically as possible, there is just “us and “them”, and it is impossible for us to coexist. We have no alternative but to fight, and we must keep fighting until we have wiped them out.”
― David Moody, Hater

“You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“The longer I live, the more I observe that carrying around anger is the most debilitating to the person who bears it.”
― Katharine Graham

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end.”
― Gilda Radner

“Sometimes events that lead us bereft of anything but grief just happen for no reason other than happenstance--a car turns left instead of right, a train is missed, a call comes too late--and the real test of our humanness is whether, in light of that knowledge, we are ever able to recover. When we again find our way despite the inability to manufacture a deeper meaning in our suffering, that I think is when God smiles upon us, proud of the strength of his creation.”
― Neil Abramson, Unsaid

“Pain explains a great deal of human conduct, but the fear of pain even more.”
― Neil Abramson, Unsaid

“Actually, I liked the fact that happenstance had brought him to the right place; it was comforting to know that that life would support us if only we were listening.”
― Neil Abramson

“I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, The Replacement

“‎The simple truth is that you can understand a town. You can know and love and hate it. You can blame it, resent it, and nothing changes. In the end, you're just another part of it.”
― Brenna Yovanoff

“Do you really want to know where we come from?" she said. "In every century, in every country, they'll call us something different. They'll say we're ghosts, angels, demons, elemental spirits, and giving us a name doesn't help anybody. When did a name change what someone is?”
― Brenna Yovanoff, The Replacement

“Sometimes this was just the way the game ended. Sometimes you did your best, and it all went straight to hell anyway.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, The Replacement

“I wanted it in the way you sometimes want to jump into very cold water, even though you know it won't feel good. I wanted to go numb. To see what it felt like to be someone else.”
― Brenna Yovanoff, The Replacement